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Berta Sichel

 

It is clearly no accident that the title of this interdisciplinary project — which confronts the possibilities of artistically and culturally representing the complex set of issues surrounding gender/domestic violence — is Cárcel de amor (“Prison of Love”). Borrowed from an epistolary love-novel with an unhappy ending by Diego de San Pedro (Seville, 1492), [i] in the 21st century its medieval outlook and beliefs may well, both metaphorically and in effect symbolize the fear of the repressive patriarchal system. As an artistic space marked by its interdisciplinarity, Cárcel de amor risks being viewed as insufficiently rigorous in addressing such a tough subject. Far from assuming that 'anything goes', this project has developed over a period of almost two years grounded on the idea that artistic and cultural codes are collective representations, and that their form and content are shaped by –and help shape– the social order.

 

As in other sentimental romances, medieval or otherwise, in Cárcel de amor physical love is connected with violence. With over 30 editions in Spanish and translated into several European languages, this medieval bestseller stresses the “rule of the father” — the literal meaning of patriarchy. Ignoring the pleas of both his family and court entourage, the King locks up his daughter Laureola and is “willing to enforce the cruelest sentence for her as her actions were cause for dishonor” (Deyermond).[ii]  In the context of contemporary feminism, patriarchy is no longer restricted to the father/daughter relationship: the first wave of feminism (Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, l969) described it more broadly as “male domination” — or any instance of male control over a woman. Theorists of the third wave of feminism expanded on Millet’s definition still further, criticizing its “reductionism” and stressing that the same kind of framework might be applied to all gender relations, including homosexual relationships.[iii]

 

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The home: beyond social science, and since literature and visual art share certain features, the medium of writing has offered, since its existence, realistic depictions of the death of a relationship. This is how Maya Angelou explains it:

 

With all heart-sore lovers I say, "I don't know what went wrong." But I suspect it was the house. The living room was two stories high, and I put my large three- by five-foot paintings on the walls, and upon those vast reaches they diminished and began to look little better than enlarged colour posters. I laid my Indian and Pakistani rugs on the floor over the beige wall-to-wall carpeting and they drowned in the vastness of the living room, appearing little more than colorful table mats on a large boardroom table.

 

Everything was built in--standard oven, microwave oven, grill, garbage disposal, compactor. There was nothing for my husband to do. …

 

Before, when our marriage had shown weakness — as all marriages do, I suppose — I would argue with my husband on his procrastination in taking out the garbage or his failure to separate the cans from the glass bottles, or his refusal to brush the Weber clean and empty the ashes. But, alas, since the house did everything itself, I couldn't blame him for his inconsequential failures, and was forced to face up to our real problems.

 

                                    Maya Angelou. Even the Stars Look Lonesome.

 

 

While selecting and shaping this book, this Angelou excerpt blaming her “dream house” for her emotional distress and marital inequality was one of the many texts we considered. In the end, we did not choose to include it. It provided me, however, while writing this text, with a link to recent studies on women's experiences of modernity — more often than not a masculine concept tied to notions of modernization, technology, and industrialization. In advanced societies, where the Industrial Revolution arrived in the early hours of the 20th century, by the outbreak of Word War II magazines and newspapers were already promoting modern lifestyles en masse, claiming that scientific and technological advances would make the situation of women healthy, happier, and more fulfilling. Modernity presented women with the possibility of a life outside the home, the attainment of a more autonomous self. Yet the story is not that simple, for as Rita Felski argues, “the vocabulary of modernity is a vocabulary of anti-home. [iv] On the other hand, contradictions and conflicts between professional achievement and domesticity are not solved just by “leav[ing] their home selves behind (Johnson and Lloyd, 15).[v]

By the mid-40s, men were returning from the war and needed jobs, and women, who had struggled through wartime to keep the family economy alive by entering the workforce, were sent back home. This time round, they were rewarded with an identity, a kind of political identity: that of the housewife.

 

This identity, glamorized by the press, cinema and radio, evolved into their social identity. Apparently freed from the burden of household tasks as modern appliances, planned spaces, gardens and other material comforts could theoretically free them from household chores, the image of the new postwar housewife was a “manager of domesticity”, a citizen with a social role whose tasks ranged from informed shopping to engaging in social activities. Yet this identity, as María Ruido’s work La voz humana explores, became one in which they would be spoken for rather than empowered to establish their own voice, to take action on their own behalf. Ruido’s video goes back to the roots of the feminist art of the 70s, when she was a child. Integrating the performative dimensions of that discourse, this work affirms that women’s voices are not always their voice. The postwar political rhetoric reworked the image of the home as a place where women would be valued but silent. It was a place of traditional values that ensured women a safe, secure, bounded existence, waiting for their husbands to come home from work each day. Conversely, for men, homeownership meant independence and the manly virtues of self-reliance; owning their own home guaranteed their manhood, both in terms of a sense of individual agency and of citizenship (Brett 1992: 73).

 

Inside this safe and sound place, women were trapped between tradition and modernity. The domestic/private sphere has been rendered as a space of emotions and subjugation, an intimate space where they were at the mercy of fathers, brothers and especially husbands — men who they often married to escape their childhood inferno, yet returning to same point of departure, indicating the inadequacy of a mapping a linear route.

 

Just because a woman runs away from an abusive father or brother and moves to another private space does not mean that the situation will change. It is inside this private space where the law of patriarchy still governs in its most primitive form. The private space, the home, and all those social arrangements based on a false notion about romantic love have represented a recurring demonstration of patriarchy’s repressive regime.[vii]

 

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Cárcel de amor: from the l970s, when gender and violence first appeared in feminist texts, until the present, when the issue is on the lips of lawmakers, politicians, social workers and psychiatrists, there have been many studies analyzing the situations of individuals or well-defined groups such as drug and alcohol addicts. Little light has been shed, however, on why some men — even those with irreproachable social behavior — become killers at home. Psychiatrists, for instance, suggest that they abuse because they are unable to express their feelings. Such men are pictured as weak, insecure, inadequate, or dependent. They suffer from poor impulse control, poorly developed egos and/or deprived childhoods. On the other hand, sociological research on the nature of abusive relationships points to a combination of factors. In “A Sociological Perspective on the Prevention and Treatment of Wife-Beating," Murray Straus argues that relatively few wife-beating cases are caused by purely psychological factors, or occur solely as a result of the organization of society (unemployment, couples living apart from friends or family). Rather, he suggests that it is a combination of these factors that produces most domestic abuse.[vi] Yet, because physical violence is not the only way to dominate a partner, activists and researchers have emphasized the importance of expanding the definition of domestic violence to include other non-violent behaviors such as emotional abuse or economic control. Envisioned as a system of control, domestic violence is also tied to other forms of gender oppression such as rape, sexual harassment, or economic disenfranchisement, in short, a broader system of inequalities that subordinate — in the vast majority of cases — women.

 

In the last couple of years, Spain has been forced to confront its shocking failures with regard to gender oppression in the home. [viii] At the time this text went to print, 10 women had been killed in first 45 days of the year 2005, while between 2002 and 2004, 169 individuals of all ages and social classes lost their lives at the hands of a person they thought to be a loved one, even if a daydream was experienced as love. And in 2003 alone, 7530 applied for protection, according to data from the Spanish Women's Institute, the Instituto de la Mujer. [ix] Those numbers, and no wonder, could not be ignored and it became vital both to locate women within a socio-economic and cultural context and to devise a broad range of initiatives ranging from work benefits to prevention and safety measures, culminating in the recent approval of a law against gender-based violence, the Ley Integral Contra la Violencia de Género.

 

In this publication, Cristina Vega reviews the history of the feminist movement in Spain and analyzes how the issue of domestic violence became a "public matter" after decades of silence. Essential to understanding this transformation in society, her text is the product of countless interviews with lawyers, social workers and educators who question the parameters of these changes as well as their urgency

 

Presenting multiple views on violence between couples — or within families —  in all its five interconnected parts Cárcel de amor tackles the subject from different angles and reflects on the immense power of a range of harmful behaviors, both physical and emotional, directed against the Other. Born of the desire to take the debate on the subject beyond the official arena, the project connects a broader range of data about gender oppression through cultural production. Its contours and energies express the multifaceted and shifting relations between cultural analysis, political critique and artistic production.

 

Consisting of a film and video program, a web-based project, a performance by Angélica Liddell, conferences and panel discussions  — made possible by a generous grant from the Instituto de la Mujer — as well as this publication, Cárcel de amor also recognizes the continuous challenges posed by new technologies which, like cultures, are constantly evolving into new forms, thus forcing us to enter the site of conflict even when we are not directly involved in the conflict itself. It was set in motion with a selection of films and videos made by co-curator Virginia Villaplana and myself, bearing in mind the following framework: as an artistic/cultural project its foundation should be reality, but rather than just reproduce it, like news images do, reworking this reality in revised forms was more important. Rather than assuming that it is the real that must be captured or reproduced, the narratives and images we selected do not depict events as we see them in the news; they are interested in the cinematic relation of text/images to produce meaning.[x]  Regarding the selection, Villaplana, who is also a filmmaker, says: "it brings the promise to begin a story with many sequences which, although filmed, have remained absent.” 

 

We also agreed that when working with media art, it is clear that the image-text relationship is not merely a technical question but “a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation.”(Mitchell, 91) [xi] The media works included here share this kind of imagination, as they do not rely on a mere display of style or manipulated imagery. Some works have pictures but not words; others have words and no image, while in others words are not related to the pictures. As combined action, image and text they depict events with “realism” or “the capacity of pictures to show the truth about things.” (Mitchell, 324)

 

Featured here with intensity and depth, Mitchell’s realism maps these contemporary representations and discourses on gender inequality and oppression. They avoid generalizing human behavior (a strategy too frequently used by the media) and are conceptually constructed using intricate metaphors and complex aesthetic structures, breaking down the barriers between public and private images. Although this publication includes synopses of all works, I will mention a few of them which are not documentaries – Villaplana discusses those in her essay — where this “realism” is a given.

 

Cecilia Barriga’s El origen de la violencia is a one-minute video which, as in advertising, instantaneously links the message with its recipient. An apparently inoffensive game between a young kid and his kitten (and not any heroic episode,) is enough, as it shows the loss with no return of childhood innocence through violence. Almost soundless — we hear only the muffled noise of breaking thorns — Beth MoysésDeshaciendo nudos focuses on the thoughts of battered and poor women. While tearing apart the thorns they should be thinking about their lives, as the artist asked them to do. The eight-minute video seems much longer, for it forces you to think about your own life as well. Teresa Serrano’s A Room of her Own is a seven-minute film about the fears and insecurities of a young woman who imagines remaking a film noir — a genre that has its origins in an expression of male insecurity in the face of social change.  What else can be considered a crime of domestic violence? Sheila M. Sofian offers Survivors, an animated film with dark images and voiceover interviews with battered women and a counselor who helps recovering male abusers. The existential questioning of Survivors produces a revelatory state of mind that cannot easily be interpreted by the viewer. Produced for Cárcel de amor by Terry Berkowitz and Blerti Murataj, Eye of the Needle uses the erosion of public and private space — a voice in a courtroom vs. an illusionary house — to explore one of the arguments of this essay: the home as battleground. Finally, Syntagma, by Valie Export, is a work rich in images that suggest a divided corporality, but one which resists any attempt to interpret this duality of the body through the usual antagonism of reality/representation. For the pioneer Export there is no bodily reality that is not under the influence of representation and vice versa.

 

Still known as "non-fiction", to distinguish it from fictional cinema, nowadays we are unsure of the nature and boundaries of a documentary, manifest in a staccato of irregular shapes like the architecture of a contemporary metropolis. To name a few: from award-winning filmmaker Lourdes Portillo we have Señorita extraviada, which tells the story of the over 300 women who have disappeared from the streets of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, many of them later found raped and murdered, their bodies dumped in ditches or the desert. Warrior Marks, by another award-winning director, Pratibha Parmar, unlocks some of the cultural and political complexities surrounding the issue of female genital mutilation and includes interviews with women from Senegal, Burkina Faso and other African countries. Domestic Violence is one of Frederick Wiseman’s most important films and “like any good Wiseman film,“ as Kent Jones wrote in the magazine Film Comment, it is “dense with unforgettable images, passages and vignettes…”

 

From the initial idea of a program exclusively made up of film and video, Cárcel de amor grew to incorporate a web-based project conceived and created by Remedios Zafra, with its own subheading Violencia Sin Cuerpos, or "Violence Without Bodies." She has selected works by international artists and created a website where not only the images but also the text and links with other institutions tackle perceptions and expose the role violent behavior plays in contemporary constructions of masculinities. 

 

In this catalogue, we have included Zafra's text and a complete description of works included in her project. Today it makes sense to think about new media as a useful theoretical category. We cannot ignore that there is another part of culture which relies on computer technology for distribution, and we have reason to suspect that eventually most forms of culture will be distributed via computer.

 

Finally, this publication is a project by itself. For several months, its co-curator Villaplana and myself, with the inspired and always welcome suggestions and contributions by Emilia Garcia-Romeo, Cristina Camara, Remedios Zafra and Eva Navarro, scoured books and Internet sites and engaged in personal conversations with people from different fields, seeking to create not a mere exhibition catalogue, but a book with many stories, since there is no single story of domestic violence.

 

Like the film and video program and the Internet project, this book reflects multifaceted point of views. Most of them were translated for the first time into Spanish or written expressly for this publication. From philosophy to poetry, we hope these pieces contribute ideas to the topic beyond the limits of official rhetoric. Structurally similar to a web site, this book is organized by links connecting related texts, avoiding a monolithic and uniform discourse. Throughout its 350 pages, interrelated cross-references flow from love to trauma through the words of Bell Hooks, who proposes a new definition of love in which abuse is not permitted, while Judith Herman observes that a traumatic event disorganizes the human system by destroying the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others (Herman l992, 53).[xii] The Slovene philosopher and sociologist Renata Saleci, in The Silence of Feminine Jouissance, examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and the gaze and the voice as love's medium, employing the tale of the sirens with a Lacanian twist. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi’s La Fotografia recounts a full sensory replay of traumatic events in a flashback of disconnected fragments.

 

The intermingling of mind and body, the inability to express suffering, or what cannot be represented, and how language is related to the mechanisms of power, are also part of this publication. As Primo Levi writes of his time spent in a concentration camp: “our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” Tori Moi, in El sexismo en el lenguaje, asks whether “language is sexist per se”: after analyzing the Spanish Dictionary, lexicographer Eulalia Ledlo's answer is a categorical yes. The representation of domestic violence in the mass media is another subject addressed in the book, and Jenny Kitzinger's article Media Coverage of Sexual Violence is a reflection on how feminist analyses have helped transform discourse and representation, language and identity, by contrasting it with media reporting. The journalist Charo Nogueira looks at the ways in which the mainstream Spanish media continues to commodify and sexualize women. Art Historian Ana Navarrete explores the argument of representation of gender and violence in art in Performance feminista sobre la violencia de género. Este funeral es por muchas muertas. Juan Vicente Aliaga writes about the relations of domination between the metropolis and former colonies, although we are supposedly living in a post-colonial age, and reviews a series of works — some made by Western artists, others not — that allude to violence.

 

We are confident that there is a vision in this collection of writings and artworks from 30 international artists, many of them expressly created for this publication. We attempted to answer at least some of the questions about where women are today in terms of their relationship to society, culture and with themselves. Yet our aim is not to present an authoritative summary. In fact, for an editor (or editors, since this volume is the product of team commitment and enthusiasm), such a project may be a source of disappointment, or even frustration, for it is impossible to assemble a narrative that clarifies every aspect of the question: “How did domestic violence begin?" Or why do men (or a partner) may hit their wives (or companions) at a given moment? 

 

But I'm getting ahead of myself: the meaning of Cárcel de Amor: Relatos culturales sobre la violencia de género is enhanced by the participation of five institutions around Spain, showing an institutional commitment to artistic projects that address social/political issues. Following its presentation at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), the film and video section will travel to Hospital de San Juan de Dios. Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo in Almagro, Centro Párraga in Murcia, Artium in Álava, CAB in Burgos, Centre d´Art La Panera in Lleida, and Filmoteca Canaria del Gobierno de Canarias in Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In different regions, each host center will organize lectures and panel discussions on the subject, intensifying the level of debate stimulated by the exhibition images which, as Villaplana likes to say, are “counterimages, versus the anonymous faces of media information  made up of cold, anonymous numbers.”

 

It is impossible to conclude this already long essay without expressing all my appreciation to the young professional women who work at Audiovisual Department here at MNCARS. To the “super” Cristina Cámara who has shouldered so many responsibilities, from curatorial to editorial, always perfect. To Noemí Espinosa who, with persistence and without losing her temper, over several months kept in touch with artists and distributors in many countries while always ready for anything we asked of her. To Eva Ordoñez, who in addition to all the administrative matters, from handling invoices to booking hotels, was so excited about the project that she was always willing to do anything we might need. To lively Eva Navarro, a department intern, who I would like to hire. The breadth of this project also required outside assistance and dedication. Emilia García-Romeu, the editorial coordinator who went far beyond her “job description” to infuse the project with intelligence and insightfulness. To Amparo Lozano for her dedication in revising, together with Camara, all the texts with clear ideas on how to improve them. To Carmen Lascasas for keeping things moving in the corridors of this institution. To Florencia Grassi, our favorite designer, for whom every catalogue is a challenge — one that she always tackles with an open heart. To Ernesto Ortega Blázquez who, with García-Romeu and Antonio García, translated all the texts with professionalism and good writing, without missing a deadline.

 

Needless to say, this project would not be possible without the support of the artists, their galleries or distributors, the writers, and the backing of this institution.                                          

 

****

Throughout the book we try to make the argument that if politics is to be fair, we must fashion a culture in which everyone understands who suffers and why. Do you currently live in such a culture?  Three months before Cárcel de amor’s opening at MNCARS, the Ley Integral de Violencia de Género was passed by the Spanish Congress. We have yet to see what its real effects will be. By now, as women we can say that our existence is in danger. It also remains to be seen whether women who have experienced violence at the hands of men — or a partner — and must turn to the criminal justice system to try to get their abuser convicted, will succeed in doing so. This project is dedicated to all of them.


Berta Sichel is the Director of the Audiovisual Arts Department at MNCARS




 

[1] The book was translated into Catalan, Italian (nine editions), French, and German. A bilingual Spanish-French edition published in Paris in l555 was reprinted 14 times, giving it bestseller status.

[2] Diego de San Pedro. Cárcel de Amor. Edited by Carmen Parrilla with a preliminary study by Alan Deyermond. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995, XLII-LV.

[3] While selecting the film and video pieces we attempted to find at least one that addresses the subject, even contacting international gay and lesbian video festivals and other associations, but it was not possible to locate any works on the subject.

[4] Rita Felski. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2000, 86.

[5] Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd. Sentence to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. Berg: London, New York, 2004,  47-87.

[6] The traditional and popular interpretation of domestic violence attributed (and still attributes) the problem either to poor anger management skills or individual pathology (Avis, 1992; Davis, 1987; Fagan, 1988; Morgan, 1981). However, research on the nature of abusive relationships revealed that, while the above factors may sometimes play a role in domestic violence, the abuse is most often not so much about expressing anger as it is about exercising control (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Fine, 1989; Hegde, 1996; Schechter, 1982). See Naming Knowledge: A Language for Reconstructing Domestic Violence and Systemic Gender Inequity. Contributors: Catherine Ashcraft - author. Journal Title: Women and Language. Volume: 23. Issue: 1. 2000. Page Number: 3. George Mason University.

[7] Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan. 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies (Sage Publication: London, 2004), 44

[8] As in Foucault's essay “The Subject of Power”, the word powerlessness has power in itself since to understand power we must ask the question “how” and not “what”. In this context, power is not something one “has” but a link between one who enjoys and the other who suffers.

[9] www.MTAS.es/Mujer

[10] See Ron Burnett. How Images Think. (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass, 2004).

[11] WJT Mitchel. Picture Theory. The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, London: l994).

[12] Judith Lewis Herman. Trauma and Recovery. (New York: Basic Books, l992).